Not the End of the Worldby Geraldine McCaughrean 184pp, Oxford, £10.99

Perhaps it is something to do with global warming and a sense of impending global catastrophe - whatever the reason, the Noah story seems to have found a new resonance. In one of at least three novels based on it this year, Geraldine McCaughrean wonders "what it was really like" to be on the ark. There is of course a long tradition of retelling the story: in the medieval Mystery Play cycle the shipwrights included in their version a shrewish and very resistant Mrs Noah, an angel and a devil. Then there's the jaunty nursery song about the animals going in two by two "for to get out of the rain". McCaughrean's novel is quite different in tone. No ridicule and playfulness here. This is a highly serious work, dark in spirit, intent on being challenging. It takes Noah, his ark and all those within it and tosses them violently on the waves of her imagination.

The biblical tale casts as its characters Noah, Noah's wife, his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and their wives. McCaughrean seizes on the invisibility of the women and gives names to the three wives. She also adds a daughter, 14-year-old Timna. It is Timna who narrates much of what happens, from the moment the first raindrops fall to the discovery of dry land after the deluge. The story unfolds in short chapters. Sometimes the other characters take over and their perspectives add a new dimension to the evocation of the great catastrophe. Bashemath, Shem's pregnant wife, reveals her arrogant vision of herself as the mother of the new humanity. Sarai, Ham's wife, witters on about recommending her best friend, Zillah, as a wife for the youngest son, Japheth, in the days before the rains come. Zillah, once aboard, grieves for her lost family and bemoans her kidnapping by Noah's sons to become a forced bride and breeding mare.

The form of the book is experimental. Through the human narratives intercede the animal's voices - the lion, the wildebeest, the mink who kills Bashemath's and Shem's newborn baby girl, the dove who is sent out in search of dry land, and the beautiful, exotic quexolan whose oily hide leads to its murder and extinction in order to line the leaking keel of the ship. McCaughrean embraces the sheer physical reality of what surviving the flood means: the pleading of the drowning people as Noah refuses to take them aboard, in the name of fulfilling God's design, the muck, the parasites, the lack of food. This is by no means an easy ride and it is made tougher by the religious zeal of Noah and Shem, whose doctrines take precedence over human need and terrorise the rest of the family.

The result is an intriguing, brave and flawed book. Its grand design seems to be to question patriarchal values and fundamentalist attitudes by revealing the underbelly of human experi ence, located especially in the women. Here, the God of the Old Testament is harsh. Timna must escape this world view and the men who hold sway over her in order to flourish in a more humanistic, compassionate tradition, and to offer the reader hope for the future.

And yet what world is this? Noah and his family are described as practising Jewish law (there are references, for instance, to circumcision and the prohibition of the making of images. Yet, according to biblical chronology, Noah comes long before the commandments (and Abraham, later in the book of Genesis, is the first to be circumcised). So while claiming to be "real" the tale avoids being firmly rooted in any contextual reality and its own source material. It is also too aligned to the specific story of Noah to get away with passing for a free-wheeling flight of imagination. The impulse to unravel a well-rehearsed legend is inspiring. In weaving the threads together afresh various loose ends still need to be connected.